TeX, LaTeX and Friends

1:57 AM

Is there an answer/reference somewhere on what sorts of things are wrong with the LaTeX wikibook? I see a lot of comments on the site against it, but they would carry more weight with examples, so I think it would be good to collect a few if they haven't been already. Maybe @Johannes_B would know?

Alan Munn

3:38 AM

@ShreevatsaR I think other than Johannes, most of us just ignore it.

daleif

4:52 AM

@Moriambar thanks. I would suggest giving a bit more examples. For example about the family 3 stuff which went over my head. Perhaps also some examples or explanations about what the 22 pieces of data is. Not everyone have access to texbook, and I don't remember if this is well explained in texbytopic

David Carlisle

6:31 AM

@daleif (@Moriambar) probably I should expand the descriptions here one day:

41

A: What do different \fontdimen<num> mean

For text fonts there are 7 parameters 1 slant per pt (used for italic correction) 2 interword space (standard width of the space ) 3 interword stretch (amount the space can stretch) 4 interword shrink (amount the space can shrink) 5 x-height (the value for the ex unit) 6 quad-width (The...

Moriambar

6:56 AM

@DavidCarlisle oohh so you tricked me! Not only you knew the fontdimen (I was sure about that), but you already wrote an answer about it

David Carlisle

@Moriambar sure but anybody would have a hard time getting from that answer to the specific case of the position of ^2 in daleif's example.

Moriambar

@daleif (possibly @DavidCarlisle) Regarding expanding the examples, it is kind of difficult for me to know how to measure heights or specific fontdimens otherwise I would've made a couple of examples; other than that I think the other really complex bit of information in appendix G is the radical positions. Perhaps I'll look into that

@DavidCarlisle I see

David Carlisle

@Moriambar not sure what you mean by measure the height \showthe\fontdimen6\textfont2 will show that one, change the numbers or \textfont to see the others

Moriambar

@DavidCarlisle ok thanks

Johannes_B

7:18 AM

@ShreevatsaR There are constant changes in this book. Even I can't give a clear example of what is wrong. Most stuff is just bad advice or bad practice.

ShreevatsaR

@Johannes_B Do you have some examples of the bad advice / bad practice? (Of course if you knew them you've probably fixed them, but the version from before the fixing would be useful too…)

Ulrike Fischer

7:34 AM

@DavidCarlisle @JosephWright the talk of typos in the expl3 docs reminded me: In the description of \char_set_uccode:nn there is a references to the non-existing \tl_to_uppercase:n.

Ulrike Fischer

7:47 AM

@DavidCarlisle If I should keep you busy: you could e.g. add the luatex names ... ;-)

2

David Carlisle

@UlrikeFischer hmm perhaps, or I could point out that you have edit rights to that text:-)

Johannes_B

@ShreevatsaR Poorly written and unstructured (i think): en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Bibliography_Management

Johannes_B

8:07 AM

@ShreevatsaR Additionally, there is More Bibliographies. Why this is on another page, no idea.

Johannes.py

Hi guys and girls, I write my thesis in Latex and love it..however is it really faster using bibtex than manually writing the references?

bcs at the time i searched for the bibtex code, I wrote the reference

Joseph Wright

@egreg regex support in expl3 core will go to CTAN probably at the weekend

Johannes.py

also I need to adapt the style to my wishes

David Carlisle

@Johannes.py that's the wrong question

Joseph Wright

@Johannes.py Ah, but getting them all right can be trickier!

@Johannes.py If it's a one-off (you never reuse the entries) and the list is short, then doing it by hand can be faster, but that's rare (and it's still easy to make mistakes)

Johannes.py

8:14 AM

I heard also lot of recommendations about zotero and citavi, but dont you think bibtex works better since its the same environment?

egreg

@JosephWright :)

Torbjørn T.

@Johannes.py If you use Zotero you still have to export to a BibTeX file.

Joseph Wright

@Johannes.py I prefer to stick to a simple BibTeX database: for me, searching is best done using subject-specific tools anyway (I'm a chemist)

@egreg I'll tidy up a few other things too then ship: this is a big change so probably wants to go on its own

David Carlisle

@Johannes.py don't look at just one document look at several documents, all your papers or all your colleagues papers or whatever you can maintain a "database" of entries and style them as required in each publication. If you do it by hand it may be quicker once but you have to do it all over again each time you need to publish in a different style.

Johannes.py

is it possible to cite in the text like this: (Smith et al. 1999: 35) where 35 is the page?

Joseph Wright

8:16 AM

@egreg, @DavidCarlisle I might check first with Bruno about the 'stub' l3str stuff: I think we might want to drop it ...

@Johannes.py Yes

@Johannes.py I'd strongly recommend using biblatex

egreg

@JosephWright Do you get “oops… something bad” at the site?

Joseph Wright

@DavidCarlisle Of course, if your day job requires papers in Word, then you get to do that anyway ;) (Don't get me started on Endnote)

Johannes.py

thx guys, you are a great help!

Joseph Wright

@egreg No?

egreg

@JosephWright Well, I got the home page back. :)

Johannes.py

8:18 AM

@JosephWright so JabRef might be the best program for creating and filling the database, right? Or do you reccomend sth else?

David Carlisle

@JosephWright my day job requires emacs, is that the same?

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright What do you mean by dropping l3str stuff? I was just looking the other day at the conversion functions and thought they could be quite useful. Or do you mean some code in l3regex?

Johannes_B

@Johannes.py en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/…

Joseph Wright

@Johannes.py I use JabRef, but of course there are other possibilities

TeXnician

@Johannes_B You recommend a LaTeX wikibook?

Joseph Wright

8:24 AM

@UlrikeFischer That is the stuff I'm talking about: the conversion functions are all very well-and-good but today are they actually useful for new material

Johannes_B

@TeXnician Why not?

@TeXnician Please check the content and make improvements where needed.

TeXnician

@Johannes_B "Most stuff is just bad advice or bad practice." But I have not looked at this specific page.

Johannes_B

@TeXnician If i would think that the content i just linked is bad advice or bad practice, i wouldn't have linked it. Templates and this wikibook might have driven me insane, but i am not crazy.

My mother had me tested.

:-p

TeXnician

@Johannes_B Maybe it was out of desperation?

Ulrike Fischer

@JosephWright I was looking at the pdf tagging. When you write to the pdf some string conversion are needed and I thought code that is "nearer" to the kernel than stringenc from Heiko would be good to have (I'm not sure if it really can be used, I got interrupted by another project).

Joseph Wright

8:34 AM

@UlrikeFischer I know PDF encoding might be a special case, but Bruno did mention that a lot of this stuff is rather esoteric (we are basically assuming UTF-8 for new documents)

@UlrikeFischer Probably needs to be reviewed in any case: removing material needs proper discussion

daleif

@Moriambar For radicals it would be nice to have an explanation of why it moves in "strange" jumps and as an addendum, but be useful for others to list some stuff one could do to "mess" with the height/depth of radicals.

Moriambar

I came to understand why radicals are typeset the way they are, jumps fully included. My problems now are:
1) I'm at work
2) I have some clothes ironing to do tonight
3) I have stuff to do tonight
4) tomorrow I will be away with friends for the whole day. Thus you'll ahve to wait.

daleif

9:04 AM

@Moriambar no pressure what so ever. This was just on my list of things that one day would be nice to have explained better. Better to have it appear one day, hthan not at all

Moriambar

@daleif well radicals are quite interesting, I think not much easier than superscripts but quite complex, and cleverly done. It will be my next autoanswered quesiton. Adn then I think I'll start work on the examples and gathered feedback on previous questions.

It will be a reputationless task, but I like doing it and perhaps some will have a concrete benefit ;)

David Carlisle

@egreg \usepackage{whatever that thing Will wrote is called}

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TeX, LaTeX and Friends

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